In England, dear Sir, said I, we sit all at our ease. The old French officer would have set me at unity with myself, in case I had been at variance, – by saying it was a bon mot – and as a bon mot is always worth something at Paris, he offered me a pinch of snuff.

1814, Henry Kett, “Introduction”, in The Flowers of Wit, or A Choice Collection of Bon Mots, both Antient and Modern; with Biographical and Critical Remarks.[...]In Two Volumes, volume I, London: Printed for Lackington, Allen, and Co., Finsbury-Square; at the Weybridge Press, by S. Hamilton, OCLC2117868, page xvi:

And if a few of these bon mots so selected be well known, they possess such acknowledged excellence, that the compiler would be justly censured, were he to deprive his readers of the pleasure of seeing them inserted in a work of this kind.

M. de Pomponne conjures her not to let Mme. Cornuel's bons mots perish, but to keep a register of them. Saint-Simon describes Mme. Cornuel as a "vieille bourgeoise du Marais," who was "full of bons mots, but of bons mots that are apophthegms."

In the lone novel of his career, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the goading Lord Henry cannot seem to help himself from delivering bon mot after bon mot. Word-play and paradoxical summation was a compulsion for [Oscar] Wilde.

Summing up a complex analysis […] we can say that [Peter] Pilz succeeds in turning Mayr's fierce endeavours of enforcement against himself, and his bonmot about the state of politics during socialist rule becomes widely cited in the next day's press.